The Promise of Solid-State Heat Engines for Energy Conversion & Storage

Solid-state heat engines offer many advantages over their traditional mechanical counterparts via compact size, quiet operation, no moving parts, and scalability. However, current commercial devices such as thermoelectrics suffer from low efficiency and challenges to further improvements. In this seminar, a different class of solid-state heat engines that utilize thermal radiation will be described, including thermophotovoltaics, which convert infrared light from a heated object to electricity.